


Ignis Fatuus (Foolish Fire)

by Clarice Chiara Sorcha (claricechiarasorcha)



Category: Thor (2011)
Genre: Bioluminescence is a very odd kink, M/M, Object Insertion, Pseudo-Incest, also known as the glowdick of destiny, which should indicate this is crack to the nth degree
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-10
Updated: 2012-09-15
Packaged: 2017-11-13 23:15:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/508774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claricechiarasorcha/pseuds/Clarice%20Chiara%20Sorcha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Thor's attempt to spend some quality time with his younger brother on an expedition to collect various specimens and herbs for alchemical purpose goes Quite Awry Indeed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [miikkaa_xx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/miikkaa_xx/gifts).



> So, I have a tumblr. And I have some mad people followed on my tumblr. Mad AND wonderful, as it happens, but...Mika, for whatever reason, plaintively wished for Thor/Loki fic involving glowing dicks. I have no idea what was wrong with my mind at that particular moment in time, but I was all YEAH BOY! and went for it.
> 
> Bear in mind this a crack prompt and I couldn't write actual crack if you put a Tom Hiddleston to my head and had him speak real sweet to my catastrophic mess of a brain.
> 
> ...once again, I am so so sorry. BUT THEY STARTED IT. AND THEY ENCOURAGED IT. AND LO, IT SHALL ALL END HERE.

Everything squelched – even the stone itself seemed porous and damp. His own clothing felt heavy and weighted down with perspiration and rain, as did his hair. Loki _hated_ to be dirty. But his seiðr could only do so much to rectify the situation; while he might use it to dry himself, the humidity would undo the work in a matter of moments. A shield was the easiest alternative, but given the situation there were simply more important matters upon which to concentrate his energies. Especially as Thor would only demand the same and he really did have better things to be doing than indulging the idiot brother who had started all this.

Gathering his cloak about him and rising from his vantage point near the mouth of the cavern, Loki felt unspeakably glad when it came to be Thor’s turn to take watch. It didn’t even bother him that there was nothing much _he_ could do in relation to breaking the curse that held them in this endless looping repeat of the same part of Vanaheimr forest.

Still, as Loki set about making a comfortable nest for himself amongst the least damp of their belongings, Thor surveyed the darkening horizon with hands upon his hips.

“I need a light.”

Loki snorted, smoothing out Thor’s favourite cloak over his chosen spot. “We’ve been over this. You lack concentration enough to hold anything I can give you.”

“Then concentrate the energy in something I _can_ hold.”

Loki ignored this; Thor had never understood even the most basic tenets of sorcery and seiðr. A moment later, a shove at the level of his kidney had him falling forward on his face. “Oh, for…” Rolling over with easy grace, hunched low in anticipation of his brother’s continued bullheadness, he scowled. “Take Mjölnir, then.”

Thor’s stubborn expression congealed into something far closer to confusion. “What?”

“I can’t work magics upon her without you as a conduit,” he said, impatient as he flowed back to his feet. “She simply wouldn’t respond to my call.” Covering his natural bitterness with command, he snapped: “Hold her.”

As soon as Thor’s right hand closed about the leather-bound hilt, Loki grasped the other. Before Thor could think to ask for an explanation he wouldn’t understand even had Loki felt inclined to give it, he murmured a cantrip that flared in his chest before then flashing down through to the hammer. Thor’s brow furrowed as he stared, presumably having felt the shift in Mjölnir’s energies. Loki couldn’t hold the curl of his lip as he raised an eyebrow. “Now, call the lightning.”

Strangely enough, not least because of the behaviour that had brought them to this pass, Thor obeyed without further question. Yet the single arc did not set the head to sparking, static dancing about head to curl about the straining muscle of a vambraced forearm as was its wont. Rather, the uru head now held a gentle constant silver glow.

Turning it over in his hand, Thor’s face held all the unsophisticated wonder of a child at play. “This is…could _I_ learn to do this?”

“I do recall many a tutor who insisted you could never be taught, so perhaps not,” Loki replied, passing his hand back through his disarrayed hair. “And certainly it will not happen tonight, given how much work I have had to do both in watching and attempting to make sense of this trap. Therefore, if I might sleep now..?”

The guilt that crossed his features just barely overwrote the continued fascination limned by the silver light of his beloved damned hammer. “I…of course. I won’t keep you up any longer, I swear.”

Despite the vow, it seemed far too short a time when Loki’s drowsing world was rendered all a-tremor. But as the shaking intensified, a grip hard about both shoulders, Loki twisted his body just enough to bring a knife to hand. The body beside his stiffened, fingertips digging deep. “Loki! It’s _me_.”

He still debated sinking the knife into some non-vital part. Sheathing it with some regret, Loki squinted at the cave’s entrance, half-shielded as it was by hanging tangled vines. “It can’t be time for the switch already.”

“It isn’t.” Letting his brother go, Thor drew back; the tone of his voice indicated an odd kind of embarrassment that Loki had rarely heard since childhood. “I…there is a problem.”

Squinting at his brother’s retreating figure, Loki took in the ambience of the cavern, noting how very dim the clammy interior had become. “Ah, I see – you were playing with Mjölnir and undid my spell, yes? Then just do the rest of the watch in the dark. You are trained for such.”

“It’s not Mjölnir.” Though he did not draw any closer, his voice took on a stronger tone. “Brother, is this truly your idea of a joke? Because surely we have things of greater import to worry ourselves with.”

“I’ve never known you to worry about much more than how long Father will permit you to spend in the training halls in favour of state gatherings.” Drawing the cloak tighter about himself in the fashion of a cocoon, Loki rolled over and closed his eyes. “I’ve also never known you to need a nightlight before. Therefore you’ll stop being such a child and allow me sleep, if you ever want me to find our way out of this damned place.”

“Loki!”

The shout all but brought the walls down; Loki rolled back, eyes flashing. “ _What_?” And Thor stood before him, hands removed from where they’d been held just before his hips, and—

“Oh.” His stare was disturbed only by one very long, very steady blink. “…what is _that_.”

“Your fashioning of mischief!”

“I didn’t…oh, Thor.” Laughter bubbled up from low in his chest, hot and hilarious. “Oh, you _didn’t_.”

Even in the darkness, Loki could feel the heat of his brother’s flush. “Fix it.”

“But I didn’t do it.”

“Of course you did!”

Loki continued to stare at the faint glow of his brother’s crotch, hidden as it was behind the thick damp material of his trousers, and raised an eyebrow. “Brother, not even I could come up with mischief as entertaining as all this, believe you me.”

Despite the well-earned epithet of _Liesmith_ Thor seemed to believe this to at least some extent; shifting on his feet, he still seemed to grow more uncomfortable by the moment. “Must you really _stare_ at it so?”

“Oh, Thor, _honestly_ now.” Loki truly hoped it was just light enough for his brother to see the brilliant smile that stole across his face at the moment. “If you want me to fix this, _staring_ is really the least of what I must do.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Well, now,” Loki drawled into the silence between them, Thor’s cape hung loose about his shoulders, “if you’re not going to let me examine it, you’re going to have to tell me more about how this happened in the first place.”

Thor set his jaw. Despite the heavy seiðr-reinforced fabric of the cloak and the darkness between them, he could see a faint tremor beneath that spoke loud of suppressed hilarity. “I don’t imagine that’s truly necessary.”

“Oh, I hadn’t realised you had surpassed my knowledge of sorcery when I wasn’t looking!” Raising one long-fingered hand, Loki wriggled them in easy dismissal. “By all means, then, rectify the situation yourself. I should very much like to go back to sleep.” The laughter lurking beneath every syllable came closer to the fore as he added with sweet cloying pity: “Just do me a favour and keep your magical glowing shaft turned away from me, as it really wouldn’t do to have it disturbing my rest.”

“This is not in any way amusing.”

“Am I laughing?” With theatrical flair, Loki raised his hands above his head in exaggerated stretch. “In fact, I appear to be _yawning_. Therefore, I shall take both my leave of you and my rest, brother mine. Good eve to you.”

Though Loki didn’t have the same tendencies as his father and elder brother – that was to say, he didn’t often shout his furies so that they were audible to a radius that included forty percent of the city – he was just as stubborn. Already he wrapped himself in Thor’s favourite cloak, settling down to his chosen place with his back resolutely to said brother.

The words of anything approaching an apology stuck fast in Thor’s throat. What he forced out instead had more the structure of unwarranted accusation. “You did something to Mjölnir.”

“Well, yes,” he said pausing in his return to his slumber, narrow eyebrows drawn together in disbelief. “I made it so it held a charge because you couldn’t keep watch without a light and everything in this infernal hellhole is as wet behind the ears as that page who couldn’t tell Eyvindr’s nonsense from a Gunnlaugr satire.” His lips curled, though between the gloom of the cave and Loki’s own mercurial nature, it was hard to tell if the gesture was sardonic or merely sarcastic even before he presented his back once again. “Your memory really is atrocious, brother.”

Shifting his weight, Thor grimaced at the pull of material over the sensitised head of his member. “It wasn’t the…charge, that bothered me.” Now he did not know which made him more uncomfortable; the continued roused sensation centred in his groin, or the fact he must speak of it to his younger brother. “Mjölnir and I…we are connected, yes?”

That had garnered Loki’s attention, at least. Rolling over, his eyes flashed bright curiosity into the darkness. “So I’ve been led to believe.”

“It left me…restless.” Words had never come easy to him, even when memorising those of another; finding sense enough to describe this left him feeling as articulate as a newborn. “I…felt as if the energy in her was trying to return to me. Like it was trying to crawl under my skin, through my nerves…seeking release.”

Loki’s bland response was too convincing to be sincere. “And so your solution was the basest one you could think of.”

“I was not thinking at all!”

“I can’t claim any surprise on that front,” Loki replied with lazy irony. “And so your release…led to _this_?”

“I didn’t…there was no release.” Frustrated and humiliated in equal measure, Thor passed a shaking hand back through his hair. “There was barely any touch! It was…my mind, more than anything. I was handling Mjölnir—”

“I believe this is almost too much information; I mean I always knew you held a certain _fondness_ for your weapons but honestly—”

“Why would you play such a cruel trick on me, brother?” Thor interrupted Loki this time, hands balling into fists at his sides. “Will it really be such an amusing tale to spread amongst smallfolk and the court alike? I know this situation is my fault, but can you really name this so fitting a punishment?”

“While it is nice to hear you realise what a fool you’ve been, this isn’t quite the manner of justice I would have concocted.” Before Thor could find a moment in which to protest this, Loki snorted as if pre-empting the inevitable. “You’re not above seiðr, brother, clumsy and ill-directed though any attempt might be. And you are particularly attuned to Mjölnir, so it is not so surprising…” In the darkness, his head tilted in sudden curiosity, the movement near-feline in its languid execution. “…is it painful?”

“It’s not…comfortable.” Certainly he felt worse by the moment just speaking to his younger brother of such matters. “But it’s bearable.”

“But how does it _feel_?” he persisted, with a sudden merciless curiosity that had Thor withdrawing half a step. “Do you wish my aid or no?”

Though he had little choice in the matter, Thor wished abruptly that he had spoken to some less ferociously scholastic seiðmaðr. “Could you not just dissipate the energy?”

The shake of his head was immediate. “It is borne of Mjölnir, and tied to her. You are the one in control of such things, not I.”

“But I can’t rid myself of it!”

“Have you truly tried?”

The rising flush, again, overtook the flare of temper. Dropping his eyes, cheeks flaming, he muttered: “I…couldn’t. Not knowing I wasn’t alone.”

His brother didn’t bother to hide the chuckle. “Perhaps you should have considered it before you got yourself into this quandary in the first place.” Thankfully he returned to a more neutral tone as he lapsed back into true consideration of his brother’s predicament. “You could channel it back into Mjölnir, perhaps.”

“How?”

Even though he’d pounced willingly on any hint of a solution at first, a moment later Thor wished he hadn’t been half so hopeful. “Hold her. And yourself. Will it to be so.” The slim shoulders moved up and down in anticipation of reflex complaint. “It’s not complex, Thor. It’s likely how it happened in the first place.” A moment later Loki had rolled himself back into his makeshift bedding, curling in upon himself so that he faced the wall. “I won’t watch. I’ll even keep my hands over my ears.”

Thor still took long moments to find impetus enough to take his brother’s – presumably – well-intended advice. The shaft of the hammer was a familiar warmth in his callused palm. In contrast his cock held a deeper heat, almost alien in nature to match the strange glow of it, locked now in the ridged cylinder formed by his fingers. With a low hiss, he worked his hand up and down; his member jerked beneath his touch, sensitive flesh almost scorning the touch. Gritting his teeth he hastened the pace, even as Loki’s low breathing sounded like faint harmony to the forced melody of his endeavour.

After several tense minutes Thor let go, teeth having almost worked his bottom lip open to the iron tang of blood and salt. Mjölnir remained silent, the strange pooling of sensation and longing still caught fast in his lowest centre. “It is not working.”

“Are you actually _trying_?” Loki asked, and Thor turned around with what felt to be his entire face afire.

“You said you would cover your ears!”

“Liesmith?” The shifting weight, the whispering of clothing and cloak spoke of a rising body. “Though I have not yet seen it. Do you wish me to look?”

“ _No_!”

“I could act as conduit, again.”

“I…what?” Any optimism he felt evaporated but a second later when he realised the implication of Loki’s latest offer. “You would have to touch me?”

“I don’t have to _look_ , if that settles your mind any.”

It lurked ugly upon the tip of his tongue, to snap back that _that_ was hardly the issue. Instead a small voice he scarcely knew as his own murmured: “If you believe it will work, then.”

That high flush still plagued him from the inside out, as if a rogue fire demon had taken up residence between skin and soul. Thor sat awkward upon the cavern floor, Loki cross-legged and near-indolent with his back turned and Mjölnir resting head-down before him. Twinned shivers twisted down Thor’s spine in sinuous helix as Loki wrapped one hand about her leather-bound haft. Thor smothered a curse even at that touch; he and Mjölnir had always been attuned to each other on a level that neared unnatural, but this…the sensation only grew more potent still when Loki extended the other behind him.

At first his attention zeroed in on the slight concavity of the palm and its well-worn lines. Despite the fact Loki was trained in swordsmanship, handled a staff well, and was deadly with his knives, it looked almost womanish in its pale cradling softness. He swallowed hard. Perhaps then he could pretend him a maiden, or a tavern wench, and that this was just hurried relief stolen unspoken in the darkness of an unfamiliar mead hall—

“Do not think even I am deviant enough to take pleasure in such a thing, Thor.” Each word held a brittle shape and heft, despite the sharpened edge of humour to the sentiment entire. “Merely let me repair the damage you have done to my spell, and then we need never speak of this again.”

Shame joined the stew of overheated emotion already roiling through spirit and flesh. _It is unworthy of us both to think such things_ , he told himself with fierce conviction; he therefore would not use his brother in so degrading a fashion. With scarcely a quaver now he caught Loki’s hand in his own and brought it back to rest upon its objective – and there was nothing soft about the hand that wound about his shaft.

“Strange – it does not seem warm.”

It took a moment to regain breath enough with which to speak; he did so with an evenness that surprised him. “Mjölnir did not either, when she held the energy.” His member had been little more than half-hard even after his own faltering ministrations. But under Loki’s knowing touch it now began a sure and steady rise. The beat of his heart quickened the blood flow, a building heat uncoiling itself – like a serpent roused to the hunt having sensed the vibration of approaching prey.

“Control yourself, brother.” Despite the bluntness of the command, Loki seemed almost amused. In contrast, Thor’s own voice had turned rough and raw.

“Is it working or not?”

The testy tone only made Loki laugh, though not quietly enough that Thor did not hear it. “Patience.”

“This is hardly the time for patience.”

As his shallow breathing hitched again, breaking up the sentence needlessly into unnatural clauses, Loki did not this time bother to conceal his amusement at all. “And how the court ladies spoke of your stamina!” he murmured with odd delight. “Tell me, then how much did you need to bribe them to spin such falsehoods? For there were rather a few of them who claimed—”

“ _Is it working_?” he demanded, temper turning ragged as his every breath. In answer Loki paused, though his rhythm did not.

“I’m…it’s peculiar, actually.” Still his hand moved even as he gave a low hum, searching and strange. “I can’t seem to…catch hold of it.” The fingers tightened without warning, then paused entire. Then they pressed hard in a sudden pulse – once, twice, thrice; Thor doubled over from the waist forward, gasping with palms pressed flat to the damp rock. Even as he struggled for control, his vision red-hazed and ablaze with a constellation of unfamiliar silver stars, he could hear Loki’s frown. “Honestly, brother, what fool situation have you got us into now?”

His head snapped up. “It is _your_ seiðr!”

“Mingled with the divine element summoned by _your_ damned hammer.” With a low grunt of exasperation, Loki released him mid-stroke; Thor could not withhold the keening whine of loss the moment all contact vanished. Mortified, he half-curved in upon himself, his cock a weight both unpleasant and unsatisfied. Then he realised Loki had begun to turn, and scrambled further to conceal his continued shame.

His brother clucked his tongue like some crone of a healer, reaching forward. “I should examine you properly.”

“No!”

As Thor curved in further upon himself, scowling with all the maddened ferocity of a dragon roused from hibernation, Loki snorted. “Well, if you are going to be a stubborn fool – I should think the most palatable solution then is to work yourself to proper release.” Rising to his feet with the grace of a waning moon, Loki’s dark head moved in definite back and forth. “Try it, then – if you fail, then I _will_ need to look. If you truly wish an end to this, at least.”

Thor looked stupidly upward, his brother a vague shadow amongst the darker that crowded around him like sycophants and slaves. “ _Release_?”

“Masturbate yourself to orgasm.” He spoke with all the bland authority of a tutor, unmoved and unmoving. “I will wait outside this time, if it makes it easier for you.”

It had not exactly been framed as a question, and Loki accordingly did not wait for any answer. Instead he glided out with Thor’s cloak hung still about his slim shoulders, fluttering in his swift wake like a retreating war banner.

When the rustle of the hanging vines had quietened after Loki’s passing, a reluctant Thor looked to the absurdity that had become his lap. One hand closed upon nothing but air, an impotent empty movement as his mind settled firm upon the image of Loki wrapped in that damned cloak. Tangled as his thoughts were, it seemed almost sinister that it would not leave his mind, in much the way the shadow of Loki’s touch still lingered upon his skin.

A moment later he shivered though the humid air was not truly cold. It banished nothing. Closing his eyes managed little more, and Thor grimaced as he reached for himself. Even as heated skin sparked to fresh life, every nerve ending surging again with renewed sensation, despair did not lurk far behind. Clever as his brother was, Thor had the distinct sensation this solution would not be the ending they sought…in any sense of the phrase.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...and this is when I really started to wonder what in the hell I'd gotten myself into.
> 
> HONESTLY I HAVE TO STOP DARING MYSELF TO DO THESE SORTS OF THINGS IT ALL ONLY ENDS IN YEARS.

By the positioning of the stars he could see amongst the haphazard breaks in the cloud cover, dawn remained yet some hours off. The ambient temperature was also cooler outside than in; Loki scowled as he tugged the cloak closer about his body. He had to admit he remained somewhat surprised Thor hadn’t yet claimed it back. His elder brother had learned long ago that anything not bolted to the floor would be considered fair game by the greatest player of such sport within the palace, and often protested as much – but then he’d likely had weightier concerns on his mind.

Settling on a rock only a few feet from the entrance of the cavern, Loki brought his knees up to his chin and drew the thick material tighter still. Though his eyes echoed the cursory sorcerous scan he performed over the immediate vicinity, he had no real concern about ambush or attack. Whoever had trapped them in this peculiarity of looped space had them where they wanted for the meantime. It was also safe to assume they weren’t being observed; Loki had kept a veil of secrecy over them since the enchantment had first come to light. That bought a wry smile to his lips; really, it was a pity Thor knew of it already. There could have been some considerable fun in that otherwise.

A moment later he pushed such meanderings aside with regret. The true concern of the moment had to be how they could get out of this situation. But between the fact the wardings seemed to hold little maliciousness and the basic hilarity of the ridiculous state his brother had worked himself up into, Loki couldn’t mask his grin. Strangely enough, he hadn’t even been lying. He couldn’t just dissipate the energy called by Mjölnir, and neither had he caused the spell to react so to Thor’s thoughts, whatever _they_ had actually been at the time of the transference. But when he’d held Thor in hand, Loki had felt the unmistakable frequency and resonance within. Whatever had become of it since, he would always know intimately the matrices of his own spellwork. Certainly it had contributed to whatever Thor had done, and presumably was one of the locks that held it fixed even now.

His tongue flicked out, moved in slow rasp over the sudden dryness of his lips. Even as Loki tried to keep his mind upon the shifted weave of his cantrip memories of an entirely different nature assailed his thoughts: the weight of his brother, willingly rousing to his touch even against the contrast of the low rumbling reluctance of Thor’s words. He hadn’t lied then, either: Thor had felt normal enough to the touch to begin with, but as Loki had played his fingers upon that skin, seeking the anchor points and bindings of the spell, he had become a strange cold heat, like lightning stolen from the heavens and placed, sparking yet, trapped within spelled confines of glass and metal—

Long fingers dug into the cloak, and Loki kept his eyes fixed upon the shifting clouds. It was best not to consider it. And yet he could do little but; this impromptu journey to the valleys of wilder Vanaheimr had been the first sizeable period they’d spent together in some time.

Pursing his lips, Loki then wondered why he was bothering to hold back the laughter that bubbled up from low in his abdomen. How typical it truly was, that Thor could turn an expedition meant for the collection of herb and plant, of animal hide and horn, into _this_ : first he had led them into a trap Loki had yet to divine the true nature of, and then he had birthed a situation more absurd than even Loki’s incongruous mind was inclined to imagine. For that alone, Loki felt tempted almost to break the confines of the wardings and then just leave Thor to his own foolish fate.

Though with any luck, he had broken the self-inflicted curse already. Casting a look back over one shoulder, Loki frowned. No sound emerged from within the cavern. Brow furrowed, he had to think it peculiar to see his brother so shy of his body; they’d been raised together, and while certainly Loki had little care for his brother’s sexual proclivities Thor had never been disinclined to boast either of prowess or conquest.

Turning his attention back to the valley that lay half-concealed in the shrouding mist like a badly bandaged wound, Loki frowned deeper. They could descend to that floor and then find themselves at its head again a thousand times or more. Turning his mind again to the wards wound about the air itself, he again wondered at the strangeness of the trap. While the essential curse could not be said to be stronger than his own seiðr, it was not strength that mattered most. As the joke of all warriors in Asgard, he knew that better than anyone. Gritting his teeth, he began to press his mind against the complex weave and its layered runes once more. It wasn’t the fact that he couldn’t break it that bothered him, for all it held a simplicity that should have made it easier than it was. It was that there was a damning _familiarity_ to the sorcery that he could not quite catch hold of, could not quite recognise—

Deep in his contemplation, long fingers working upon his knee while lips moved from one language to the next, Loki lost sight of reality. Few people could sneak up on one who resided so often in the darkest corners, but in that moment Loki blazed as brightly as any sun, oblivious to all those he cast in deep shadow.

“Brother?”

A knife flashed out, and but a moment later wedged deep in the stone behind his head. But Thor had not moved, seemed scarcely aware of the warning shot his brother had let fly. Instead the broad form stood motionless, shoulders in low slump with hair hanging lank in the fashion of a mask to hide his face. Loki followed that downward gaze, noted the faint glow still at his brother’s clothed crotch.

“Ah…I take it that my suggestion did not achieve the desired result?”

Despite the amusement Loki could not conceal, Thor’s despair remained about him like a miasma, head shaking. “No. I could not…that is to say…”

Loki snorted, again wondering at his brother’s uncommon reserve. “Thor, I promise you that I’ve remained out here this whole time—”

“It was not that.” His hands clenched, unclenched at his sides. “I simply…my touch, it does not satiate. It rouses, but then…”

“Perhaps you’re just doing it wrong.”

Thor’s head snapped up, disbelief warring with continued humiliation. “I’ve been doing it for years, I think I know what I find pleasing!”

Loki flapped an appalled hand in his direction. “More information than required, thank you.”

“Then what information is required?” he demanded, infamous temper finally winning through his embarrassment. “What even is happening here?”

Still seated upon his favoured rock, Loki crossed one leg over the other and balanced his chin upon one hand, the elbow braced upon his knee. “I suspect the weave I placed to maintain the energy within Mjölnir has moved to…another host, shall we say.”

“So release it!”

Shaking his head, Loki stared off into the mid-distance, mind quite set upon the internal rather than the seething body of the external. “I examined it when I attempted to act as conduit. I might have woven the fabric of it, but it is no longer my spell to undo. Your energies have become too entwined at its most basic level, particularly given that it is Mjölnir’s energy held by it.”

“So what do I do?” Frustration had Thor pacing now, expression quite as thunderous as his divine gift. “Would it really help if you looked? Because…can’t you just see with your…seiðr?”

“The physical nature of it, no.” With carefully schooled disinterest that he had perfected only through long practice, he added: “I am not going to force you to anything, Thor.”

From the pained look Thor gave him, he knew exactly the game his brother played. “You are cruel, Loki,” he muttered, eyes again upon the damp ground as a broad arm crossed the other, one hand held just below the level of his mouth. It was a stance Thor often used when in thought, and his mouth twisted as he came to accept what seemed a particularly distasteful conclusion. “Could we at least go back inside?”

Loki gave a light bow that might only be described as mocking; Thor scarcely acknowledged it, turning to duck his head beneath the overhanging rock. Pressing vines out of his path, Loki trailed him inside and paused only when Thor did.

“Could you take my cloak off, please?”

Loki frowned at his back, fingers tightening their makeshift clasp. “But I’m cold.”

“ _Please_.”

Thor choosing to plead rather than argue took much of the fun out of the situation. With a frown Loki shrugged it loose and then set it aside, folding it more by habit than actual care for his brother’s belongings. As Thor inclined somewhat in his direction Loki took his cross-legged place on the floor, and beckoned Thor down. He came reluctant, but without further word he set about undoing the laces of his trousers again.

Every motion was wordless, clumsy. Loki kept his eyes averted throughout and though his lips remained motionless, in his mind they moved in wide smile.

“Loki.”

At that uncertain invitation, he raised his eyes to finally examine truly what had become of his brother’s apparent pride and joy. The glow of it proved stronger than he had imagined, and Loki could not help but incline forward. Blinking, Loki found himself rendered mute more by actual amazement than artifice. Fascinated, one hand automatically reached out, stilled only by Thor’s immediate flinch. Looking up, Loki’s confusion almost felt to have the consistency of pity.

“I’m not going to hurt you, brother.”

“I didn’t…” Thor grimaced, head bowed low with hands fisted upon the tensed muscles of his great thighs. “…this is humiliating.”

“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”

He almost laughed. “It’s never _glowed_ before.”

“Well, yes, that is a novel state.”

Impatient as he was, Loki stayed his hand; the fingers twitched still. Sorcery had always been his scholastic weakness, particularly when as curious as all this. But seeing the low heave of Thor’s shoulders he kept his own hands in sight upon the cavern floor between them, gave him another moment. Thor swallowed, struggled with his next words. “And you’ve never seen it…not when…”

“I shall endeavour not to be envious of the manhood lauded from one end of Asgard to the other,” he said dryly. “Come, brother – do you wish me to fix this or not?”

With his hair still hanging in his face, Loki could see nothing of Thor’s expression when he spoke. “Can you swear to me that this was not a trick of yours?”

“Would you believe me even if I did?”

Though he’d meant it only light-hearted, the depth of Thor’s response shivered through his body with all the tectonic force of Ragnarök awakening. “If you swore by the ties of blood and brotherhood between us, then I would never have cause to doubt you.”

For a long moment Loki could only stare at his brother’s bowed head. Suddenly he felt very small, and the low pitch of his force reflected it with all the clarity of Urðr’s well. “I swear by the love I have borne you from the moment I was born to these realm that this passing was never my intention.”

When Thor raised his head, his lips were pressed tight together and his eyes remained closed. “Then do what you must. I put myself in your hands, brother.”

Loki almost felt reluctant in the face of such trust. Yet curiosity drove his hand forward, mouth dry. Despite the rich glow, like a lightning bolt held frozen in a stolen moment of purest time, Thor’s member had turned flaccid again. It did make him wonder how hard Thor had tried to bring himself off – but then the fact that his cantrip had apparently evolved to keep the light and energy borrowed from Mjölnir concentrated in one place…Loki frowned, leaned closer. Cupping the weight of it gently in one palm, the fingers of the other hand danced in light tracery across velvet-soft skin as if seeking the warp and weft of the weaving upon it.

Thor shuddered. Loki ignored him, though it proved harder to do so when the flesh began to heat beneath his ministrations, hardening by the moment. “Don’t do that,” Loki said, irritated. “I am trying to concentrate.”

“Then…do not…” A gasp wrested itself free of his strangled throat, his member now half-hard and growing still. “Loki, I… _stop_.”

He chose not to. “Do not presume to tell _me_ how to work seiðr.”

“I cannot…this is…STOP!”

A hand flailed outward, struck his elbow; Loki shrugged it off, but a moment later it found its intended target. As Thor’s grip clenched tight enough to grind his fingers together, Loki cursed in three different languages before looking up with fresh fury setting his eyes to gold-tinted green flame. “Thor!”

But his brother’s face was flushed, eyes too bright. Loki’s anger caught in his throat as he saw the erratic rise and fall of those broad shoulders, moving to match the heave of his chest. “Please.”

Even as his heart twisted like a bird strangling in the bars of its gilded cage, he only removed his hands with a deep scowl. But even after settling them upon his own knees he could not stop staring, the fascination growing; with Thor’s hardness, the glow had become brighter still.

“I still think release might be the best bet,” he mused aloud, and Thor gave a barking laugh that teetered dangerously close to the precipice of despair.

“I’ve told you already – it doesn’t work!”

“You rouse to my touch well enough.” Choosing the blandest tone and expression held in his extensive repertoire, he raised his eyes to his brother’s ridiculously flushed face. “Has it grown so hard under your tending alone?”

“No, it merely – _no_.” Having since released Loki’s now-bruising hand, Thor dug his fingers deep into the bunched muscles of his thighs. “No.”

“Then it is a potential solution we must eliminate.” Tilting his head, Loki pressed his lips together in a thin line. “And I am the only other person here.”

Thor shook his head so rapidly the tangled ends of his hair whipped across his face, stuck there. “I could not ask such of you,” he insisted, but each word felt weak and half-felt. Loki reached forward, pressed the hair back behind one ear, and spoke purposely light and nonchalant.

“Oh, it is not such a chore. Rarely am I given anything worth my attention, and here I have two tasks that are proving most challenging to solve.” With that said, he allowed a devilish grin to curve his lips upward. “And given one of them causes my dearest brother such discomfort, how could I not enjoy it?”

“You’re not supposed to _enjoy_ it!”

Rousing Thor to temper had always been one of life’s simplest pleasures, Loki thought with idle amusement. “It is a bodily function like any other,” he said, and let his hand fall away from his brother’s flushed cheek. “Look the other way, if you must, and I will attend to it.”

“ _Loki_.”

But Loki could not see what expression Thor wore to match that anguished word. “Be quiet, I can’t concentrate with you wailing in my ear like a child.”

Before any further protest could take form, Loki’s hand struck with the force and precision of a cobra. But its grasp was kind and steady about his brother’s cock, and he gave no pause before beginning a quick pump. Nothing of the action could be compared to his usual _modus operandi_ in such matters; this was not intended for pleasure, its purpose entirely different. Loki still found he had to bite his legendary tongue to hold back the reflexive insistence that he could make this so much better, had he been with a different partner.

It seemed to matter little, in the end. Thor’s harsh breathing, and the way his hands fisted at his sides, seemed to indicate he was focused on little more than the result of Loki’s actions. A moment later his great hands flashed out, finding painful purchase upon Loki’s upper arms. Two breaths later a clammy forehead pressed to his shoulder as Thor doubled over from the waist, chest heavy with every rough gasp for air he attempted.

“I’m not going to stop.” Despite the snapped words, Loki almost felt pity for Thor; it evaporated a moment later when Thor’s blunt nails came close to breaking his skin. “So cease fighting this, Thor. It is almost done.”

His head rolled back and forth, jerky and uncontrolled. “This is madness.”

“Oh, and I’m so very good with that, aren’t I?” The words were nearly crooned, an unexpected tenderness settling upon his mind and mood alike. “So be still a moment longer, and it will be done.”

Thor’s only reply took the form of a low groan, like brontide born from low in his trembling body. Loki tightened his grip, but not only for the original purpose. He felt as if he needed to hold on to something, as if he himself were in danger of being drawn with acquiescent calm into the very heart of the roiling maelstrom. A headiness had overtaken him, mind turning near giddy with the realisation of what he held in his hand, both physical and metaphorical.

On its heels followed close a pleasure that chose to coalesce deep in his own abdomen, worryingly close to the site of a potential physical response of his own. Loki pressed it aside, far more intrigued by the other. It had the sensation of a tide, washing over him whenever Thor gave another involuntary sound. It was not unfamiliar. He often felt something similar whenever he had one over on his brother, whenever he manipulated him to exactly where he wanted him to be.

“No,” Thor whispered, and Loki’s smile grew wider still.

“Oh, yes.”

“ _No_.” Desperation drove his head upward, pupils blown wide like twinned black hole opened by the darkest of forces in order to swallow the universe entire. “No, Loki, it…it will make a mess.”

The incongruity of the comment had his eyes narrowing, more irritated than confused. “What nonsense are you speaking now?”

“You hate mess.” He struggled to catch his breath, knuckles whitened; Loki’s skin felt numb where the fingers dug deep. “Loki, it is…I can’t…it will…”

The spreading grin he wore was of the sort that terrified soldier and sorcerer alike. “Thor, don’t be such a child. It will all be over in a moment.” He squeezed hard, drew up sharp from base to tip. “I won’t even tell any of the court ladies of your shameful stamina.”

His hips bucked up, face a perfect combination of misery and impending pleasure. “No, Loki, please, this won’t work—”

“But it _is_ working.”

“ _Stop_!”

From a young age, Loki had been accustomed to obeying his elder brother’s commands – or at least, to all intents and purposes. With a faint smile he released him, drew back with his hands raised both to his shoulders. “Well, if you’re so concerned for my delicate sensibilities, then.”

Thor scarcely had a moment to look relieved before Loki dipped his head and closed his mouth over his brother’s cock.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was rather at this point that I realised I had absolutely no control over this story. Or any idea what I was doing.
> 
> FAIR WARNING IS FAIR...right? _Right_?!
> 
> [crawls back into hobbithole]

The sensation of falling was not alien to Thor. Though many things had come easy, flight under the influence of Mjölnir had taken some time to master. Oddly, it had been Loki who had given him the best advice as to how to perform such an act – but then perhaps it could not be considered odd at all. Loki had then himself been named seiðmaðr for hundreds of years, and Mjölnir had been known as a deeply powerful artefact from the moment of its very creation.

Perhaps it was odder that Loki had not cared much to experience flight himself even after his brother had stopped careening into walls and spires and the unforgiving ground that held all such up. Only rarely would he permit Thor to bear him anywhere, and whenever Thor attempted as much without permission it would only guarantee pointed silence, malicious prank, or some combination of both for as long as Loki’s temper dictated. And Thor knew better than anybody else that no-one held grudges near as well as his brother.

But for all the basic principle remained the same, this was falling of a different kind entire: to Thor it was as if he tumbled from the very highest branches of Yggdrasil, hitting all on his twisting turning way down. As much as he grasped helplessly for purchase, everything slipped through his fingers and he just fell faster. And yet there was no fear. There could be no fear, not when he knew his brother waited for him below.

The dark head between his legs remained an anchor in its slow thoughtful pulse of back and forth. With every nerve alight, proper thought ought to have been impossible – and yet, even as he felt the world turning about him like a tumbling kaleidoscope, Thor decided this was different to anything he had known before. Nothing of this situation resembled what he had experienced with those maidens willing to perform as such for the Prince of Asgard – and they were often only too pleased to so do. In contrast his brother’s willingness was something unique unto itself, ferocious desire linked to his boundless need to seek knowledge wherever it might be found.

With only hand upon him, Thor had been close to the brink. Given the enveloping warmth now about him, and the tightness wrought by cheek and tongue – Loki’s actions should only have drawn him off all the quicker. And yet his entire world seemed to have slowed, leaving him in endless freefall at terminal velocity. Thor could only stare, entranced, as Loki continued his studies. The strengthening glow, seen through the translucency of his pale skin, rendered his face in the fashion of caricature; the dark eyebrows had drawn together, and the long fingered-hands remained yet upon his thighs. He had obeyed his elder brother’s command in _that_ , at least.

The sudden tightness in his chest stole what little breath remained to him. _His brother_. They should not be doing anything of this idiot nature. Yet he could not speak, could scarcely imagine telling him to stop now. Loki’s hands were moving now, taking a firm and steady hold about his hips to stop Thor from bucking artlessly upward. His own hands twitched upon the cavern floor; he gasped hard with the desire to cradle Loki’s head, to card his fingers through the dark hair. He set his jaw, held them still. Such things would be too intimate, he knew. None of this was for pleasure.

Closing his eyes, Thor tilted his head back and bit his lip so that it bled – because he could not deny it, there _was_ pleasure in this: the quick tongue, cool over his length, searching and strange and familiar all the same. A low hum shivered through his skin, and he sighed. He recognised the tune from hours spent at study in his brother’s company. It was accompanied by a sinking sensation in his stomach as he realised he would never hear it again without remembering how it thrummed in this moment from one body to the next, echoing the building pressure centred in his cock as his hips worked again, silenced lips moving in wordless press over heated skin.

Occasionally, when well-roused, Thor would lose control over his divine gift. Such occurrences had proved rare enough; the most notable had been with a comely maid from Vanaheimr. Even now, he remembered her well: doe eyes as dark as her hair, smooth skin like milk over rich curve of hip and breast. She’d been a courtier in the house of an envoy. Strangely, her voice had slipped his memory – but then she had chosen to say little with word, had spoken instead with the swing of a hip and the tilt of slanted eye. Thor had had her only once. The act had played out almost in silence save for low moan and keening gasp reflected from the latticed panels of a gazebo deep in his mother’s garden, their bodies tangled upon the spread of his cloak. Even long after they had parted it had rained all the afternoon, sweet and warm, and he had been content.

Yet the contentment had evaporated when Loki had not come to dinner. Thor had found him later upon the rainbow bridge, seated at its edge with his feet set upon nothing but space. He’d had nothing to hand, merely stared out into the star-wrought cradle that had given Asgard light and life so many millennia ago at the Allfather’s command.

“What bothers you?”

Sometimes, with Loki, it was like being invisible; he’d always had a knack for making it seem as if he were alone when he were not. “The rain,” he had said, finally, just as Thor had turned to take a step away. “The sky is clear, out this far.”

A faint guilt had assailed him then, though he didn’t quite understand it. Attuned to sorcery as he was, Thor did not find it strange that Loki had known from whence the soft rains had come. “You’ll fall, if you sit so close to the edge.”

And when Loki had turned his face to him, like a small flower seeking the sun, his grin had been as wry as his words. “Oh, but I should think you’ll always be there to catch me, brother mine.”

But it was Loki there to catch him now, both hands now tight on his hips as he drank deep of his lust and life. Even as his released poured forth into his brother Thor felt it still, the sensation upon his skin like that of Mjölnir’s summoned storms. Wild and free, far beyond his control, it sparked like loosed charge as it sought the paths of least resistance; it left him afire even when it lowered to pulsing embers. Deep hope filled him, knowing that perhaps his release had indeed broken the spell. And already his brother was sliding back, softening cock slipping free of his talented mouth with an obscene pop.

When Thor chanced a look down, eyes hooded and mouth curved in post-coital grin, he knew what he would find. And then disappointment stiffened his spine, a low groan rumbling from low in his throat. His damned cock still held that brightness, though as its hardness began to subside it dimmed somewhat. In despair he looked to his brother – and then wished with swift regret that he hadn’t.

Still kneeling between his spread thighs, Loki had his fingers inside his mouth, eyes narrowed as if in deep contemplation; Thor had seen him wear the same expression when deliberating some particularly tricky piece of translation while aiding their father’s ambassadors. At their withdrawal his long throat worked in a swallow, but something remained still upon his fingertips. Thor’s eyes widened, voice strangled and hoarse.

“ _Loki_!”

“It tastes normal enough,” he said, frowning as he tilted his head at the whiteness still there; tilting it towards what little light there was, he shook his head as if utterly baffled. “And its appearance is no different.”

Something between horror and fury coiled together in his stomach, and his skin still felt afire with the electricity of but moments ago. “Is…are you saying this is something you have done _before_?”

Loki blinked over at Thor with some surprise, as if he had quite forgotten his brother was even there. “I don’t make it a habit to suck fluorescing cocks, no.”

“That is not what I meant!”

The roughness of his voice only made Loki tilt his head in wry disgust. “I know what you meant. We cannot all be fools such as you.”

Given the events of what was feeling to become an endless night, Thor was no stranger to embarrassment. This was a different kind of shame, low and small where it settled like a rock in his stomach. “Loki, I…”

But Loki merely suckled the last of Thor’s spend from his fingertips, careless as if it were merely some treat he’d run his fingers through at the dinnertable. “It’s not your business except in the context of my fixing this.” His voice had taken on the bland quality he reserved generally for people not his brother, and bracing his palms upon his knees he rose in one easy curve. “It _is_ most peculiar, however.”

As he moved across the cavern he retrieved the cloak with absent purpose, draping it again about his shoulders. Even as he sighed internally, Thor couldn’t be surprised by it. His brother was a magpie; if Thor ever missed some belonging of his, it was almost guaranteed that the light fingers of his brother had collected it at some time. Loki’s room had long been a museum of artefacts borrowed and acquired and outright stolen.

 “I wish you would not do that,” he said, voice holding only the vaguest tremor even as his blood still felt to be charged and alive. His cock, softened now, still gave off a low glow, and he winced even as he stared at his brother.

“Suck cock?” Loki said, with obscene nonchalance. “It’s your fault.”

Thor wanted to laugh, but any humour he might take in the situation caught in his throat as he raised one hand scarcely high enough to wave in his brother’s general direction. “No, my…”

Loki blinked, looked down. “Oh.” Tightening his grasp again, he shrugged. “I’m cold, honestly.”

Thor’s own smile was wan, but held true. “Honesty from the trickster?”

“Don’t start,” he grumbled, and certainly did not surrender the cloak as he came to sit down near his brother’s side. The motion struck Thor with the uncommon urge to shy away, but Loki’s attention had that clinical tilt to it as he turned his gaze to Thor’s crotch again. “Did it feel to you as if it were going to work?”

“I…yes. Truly, at first, I thought it had.”

The more Loki stared, the greater became the compulsion to cover himself with hand and trousers. But he gritted his teeth and bore Loki’s examination. His entire body felt to still crawl with withheld energy; the sudden twitch of his dominant hand reminded him of how it felt in the moments before battle, when all he wished to do was take up Mjölnir and lose himself in the physical, to slave all that he was to the desire of flesh and roused blood.

“Hmm. I felt the same, as if I had a hold of it, but…” Loki leaned back, lips pursed; Thor felt an odd jolt to remember how they had looked, stretched and shining, around the hard shaft of his cock. But Loki’s eyes were hard now, not soft and dreaming. “You were holding back, perhaps.”

It stung as if Loki had buried one of his damned knives right into his solar plexus. “I want this over as much as you!”

The sceptical look Loki wore promised both pain and pleasure, though Thor could not decide whom would be treated to which. “I wonder…” The head tilted again, and between the dilated pupils in the darkness and the dishevelled hair about his pale face, Loki resembled nothing so much as a horned owl. “I am your brother.”

The ever-lurking flush deepened. “I know that!”

“Perhaps another form would be more pleasing to you.” One finger rose to his lips, tapped there with calculated purpose. “You are terribly fond of Sif, aren’t you.”

Realisation hit him as hard as a blow from Mjölnir when badly caught. “Loki, _no_.”

“Are you going to bow to my superior knowledge or not?”

“Not in this!”

Barely bothering to suppress an accompanying snicker, Loki clucked his tongue and flowed to his feet again. “Then attend to yourself while I consider the situation further. I can’t concentrate with that ridiculous glow in my line of sight.”

_But you don’t have to consider how it might feel to always have it so,_ he thought with a churlishness more suited to a child. But his hands had steadied considerably as he put himself away; the sensation of constant unease seemed to be dying down. The basic discomfort remained and Thor bowed his head, allowing his hands to dangle between his knees. He then began a measured count, taking long slow breaths to match as taught by a tutor many years before. But even as he sought the calm before the storm, he could still hear Loki moving about. When it stopped, he frowned. A motionless Loki was a contemplating Loki, and that often could not bode well. A rippling sensation down his spine just as bare feet stepped in his view, and he frowned deeper yet as he looked up.

“Loki, I believe—”

All ability to speak dried up with his mouth entire. Loki stood before him with a curved and sharpened grin, wrapped in Thor’s cloak and little else. But Thor knew it to be Loki only because they had been the only two to come to this place. Otherwise, the wanton creature before him held not the look of Loki at all. Beneath that cloak lay the lean muscles and welcoming curves not of Loki, but of Sif. And when Loki tilted her head, the loosed dark hair moved about slim shoulders like the welcoming embrace of falling night.

“I said _no_!”

“Yes, but you’re an idiot.” With no further argument necessary to his mind, Loki raised his hands and let the cloak fall. Instinct had Thor’s eyes averting immediately, but then he’d never been able to deny himself anything he wanted for long. He looked to the borrowed face, gaze skimming quick over the body laid bare. At the calculated grin he found, his skin heated again, and he dropped his eyes again. But the low chuckle pulled his attention upwards once more, filament called to lodestone, and his mind and groin alike could not help but take note of varying points of interest during the second ascension.

Yet even as Loki grinned wider with Sif’s lips, victory taken where it had not yet been given, Thor shook his head in emphatic denial. “No… _no_. It is unworthy – both of her, and of you.” He could not look at his brother in the borrowed form as he reached for the cloak, securing it about her shoulders with clumsy fingers. Then without another word, before Loki could speak with a voice not his own, he turned and stumbled away.

The air outside the cavern, while rich with humidity still, felt blessedly cool upon the heat and crawling chaos that had become the skin he was forced to wear. Pressing his lips tight together Thor stepped close to the edge, the valley opened before him like the mockery of escape.

A half-bitter grin twisted his generous mouth into something close to a grimace. This was not how he’d planned this, at all. He’d thought himself so clever, coming up with the idea that they should go upon this excursion together, just the brothers alone: to Vanaheimr to search out the plants and herbs required for Loki’s alchemic experiments. Though Thor always proved little use in identification or collection of flora, he could hunt out the small animals and reptiles whose hide and claw and organs Loki favoured for such matters. Yet for all his brilliance in conceiving of such an idea, they had not got very far before things had turned sour.

Noting the position of the flattened rock Loki had chosen earlier, Thor sat down heavily. He had just wanted to spend time with his younger brother. He had even had forethought enough to make it so they would be doing something more to Loki’s taste than his own. And now he almost wanted to laugh for all he did not know what was worse: that he felt to be going mad, or that Loki took it so easily in stride.

“Thor.”

“I would prefer to be alone.”

As was his wont when his brother took to such sulking, Loki simply ignored him. Taking his accustomed place at his side, Thor noted with some irritation that he was still wrapped in the damned cloak for all he had resumed his true form. Then he saw the bare ankles, slim at the point where they crossed; his breath hitched, and he closed his eyes even as he cursed his idiot self for ever allowing things to progress so very far.

“If you are so cold, then perhaps it would make sense to dress.”

Loki made a small hmming sound that might have been agreement, but said nothing and made no effort to move. Always more one for action than words, Thor let the silence hold. But it crawled over his skin like an army of seeking ants, and eventually he surrendered, turning to face the watching Loki with hands clenched in frustration.

“And how do you even have such excellent knowledge of what Sif looks like unclothed?”

“Purposes of research.” Nonchalant, he gave Thor a bright grin more suited to his childhood self. “How do you?”

With a snort, Thor looked away, his hands tangled about one another between his knees. “The result of actions far less noble, at least to a mind as attuned to scholastic pursuit as yours,” he muttered, and Loki shifted at his side.

“Was it not good between you, then?” When no answer was forthcoming, Thor felt rather than saw his shrug. “It is no issue. I can easily enough choose another form.”

A shudder rocked his body entire. He had no wish to discuss the complexities of his relationship to Sif with his brother, especially given she had once had hair the colour of the sun before Loki had taken offense at Thor’s fascination with it. Bowing his head again, Thor shook it with slow regret. “No. I will not…”

Loki let the silence rest between them, undisturbed, for what seemed a long time. Then he curved his legs beneath the cloak, hunched forward like an ancient skald about some difficult piece of verse. “I am almost beginning to wonder if it might be Mjölnir,” he murmured, half to himself; Thor gave a short bark of laughter.

“I thought we had established already she is a part of this problem.”

“Yes, but perhaps she is key to the solution too.” Inclining towards him, Thor stiffened, and wondered; he had never curved from Loki’s presence before. So joined at the hip had they been as children and adolescents, it was more usual to curve towards him. And yet Loki seemed so deep in his thoughts that he did not notice. “I was touching you both when I lassoed her energy to her. And you were touching yourself and her when you did this, yes?”

Unwilling, Thor gave a jerky nod. “Yes.”

“So logic states that Mjölnir wishes to be a part of this.”

The sudden tightening in his groin left him breathless, struggling to speak his answer with the evenness that came so easily to his damned brother. “She is a hammer, she wishes for nothing.”

“She yearns for battle and blood, just as does her master. Or is it more that she has mastered you?” And though he was rising, moving back inside, Thor knew his brother grinned; wondered how he could be so easy in this even as he tossed back over one shoulder: “Come back inside!”

Dread roiled low in his gut as he followed his brother’s slim form, the thick drapery of the misappropriated cloak doing nothing to mask the easy sway of hip and long leg. When Loki turned back, Thor already knew he was not going to enjoy this even before Loki spoke.

“You need to release while I hold Mjölnir,” he said, bald. “When last you reached a peak the energy did attempt to shift, but it did not wish to pass to me. But perhaps, it might be encouraged to so as it did originally and pass _through_ me.”

“Again?”

“Yes, but I think to be certain…” For the first time Loki appeared disconcerted, his eyes dropping. “…in all honesty, Thor, it really would be easier if I played at being Sif.”

“What?”

“I mean, it can be done in this form, but…” At Thor’s bewilderment Loki first blinked, and then cycled through frustration and amusement alike. “Oh, for… _penetration_ , brother. We need actual penetration for this to succeed.”

First he came over very hot. Then, he felt as if he’d been entombed in Jötunheimr’s deepest ice fields. “ _No_. Absolutely not.”

Again, Loki gave that innocent blink. “Why not?”

“It is unworthy of us both!”

The shout did not move him at all. “I’ve already had your cock in my mouth, and it hardly seems to have unmanned me.”

“You turned into Sif!”

Loki could not answer immediately, for the laughter that was his instinctive first response. “Oh,” he wheezed, hand upon his abdomen beneath the cloak, “oh, shall I tell her you said so? I should so enjoy the fireworks!”

“Loki, no.”

“As you would.” But it was not the assent Thor wanted it to be, he thought with sinking sensation. Loki dropped to his knees, one hand still holding the cloak closed at his throat. Examining the hammer, its shaft pointed to the ceiling, his eyes turned critical and searching. “Ah, yes…it could be done.”

“ _What_ could be done?”

But his brother seemed to scarcely be speaking even to him, fingers again pressed to his lips. A moment later they ghosted light over the handle, and Thor swallowed; surely it was his imagination, that the same touch had shivered along the length of his own cock. “It will be uncomfortable, I think but…” Loki nodded and shrugged in the same movement, some momentous decision reached. “I shall call it research, and have done with it. And I might as well admit I always _have_ wondered.”

Though Thor could not be certain what Loki planned, when he rose and threw off the cloak he felt only the instinct to turn away from his brother’s careless nudity. But he knew better than any the risk of turning one’s back on the Liesmith when he was at play. “Loki, what are you doing?”

“Preparing her.” Resting on one knee again, the long fingers plied the leather loop at the terminal end of the handle, working it free. Having discarded it to one side he then conjured from the æther a small vial of twisted glass. Thor’s stomach felt to have become a bottomless pit as those fingers began to drip the oil upon her shaft, heedless of how it pooled at the base upon her head.

“Stop that,” he breathed, not sure whether he choked upon the words or the rich scent of the oil that worked through the air.

And Loki did not heed any of it. “Penetration, brother,” he repeated, and his fingers continued to rub against the hard metal. “I believe it is necessary to lift this curse of yours.”

“We didn’t need it to start this!”

“But it was _simple_ , in the beginning,” he said, mouth held in pitying curve. “You’ve just made it so very hard in the time since.” Standing again, he frowned at the hammer; Thor turned away, filled both with shame and sudden heat at the lean curve of his brother’s pale form. “I will take Mjölnir, and then I will take you, and then perhaps she will accept back what is hers.”

His hands clenched into tight fists, eyes clenched so tight he saw red shot through with silver rather than the comfort of darkness. “You are madness itself,” he whispered.

“So they like to tell me.” And he made no effort to conceal his amusement as he added with insouciant ease: “You don’t need to watch.”

Thor did keep his back turned, but though Loki had always accused him of being too simple for anything approaching a good imagination, Thor found he could visualise all too well what his brother did now. The low sounds he made were descriptive enough to paint a thousand pictures in Thor’s roiling mind. He wished to cover his ears, but it seemed like surrender, as if it were acknowledgement that he had lost some ridiculous game Loki had challenged him to.

But this like no other game they had ever played, as children or otherwise.

Swallowing hard, he thought it strange that Loki himself did this in so subdued a fashion. He wondered if Loki were always so during sex; certainly he had not said anything, had made very little sound while working Thor to release with first hand and then delicious grasping greedy mouth—

A deep groan, startled and deep, had Thor turning with the involuntary instinct to go to his brother; it had always been thus, from earliest memory. But the protective urge was for nought. Loki was not in pain, for all his mouth hung open and his eyes had gone very wide. Another keening loosed from his working throat, and he twisted his hips; drawn by the movement Thor looked down, and felt the world halt when he saw where Mjölnir’s oiled haft drove deep in his brother’s welcoming body.

And his own damned cock was already rising, its cursed radiance brightening as Loki extended one trembling hand with palm turned to the sky beyond the cavern ceiling. Four fingers moved in metachronal wave, beckoning him forward. The smile he wore was sin itself as he whispered: “I believe we are ready for you now, brother.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm fairly certain when I started this is was supposed to be crack smut and little else.
> 
> But then the feels started.
> 
> AND THEY NEVER EVER STOPPED.
> 
> I am so very very sorry.

Thor’s mad little brother, they called him. Always taking things too far, they said. Such a creature would never to amount to much amongst the ranks of Asgard’s elite, they laughed. Seiðmaðr and sorcerer, they named him, fit for little more than silver and shadow.

And now Loki had speared himself upon his brother’s weapon, and at that very moment summoned him forward so he might again take him down his throat.

Perhaps they were right, he thought with wry self-deprecation, and could not subdue his heart’s fluttering heave of delight. He could instead just assume this a victory, to have his brother standing before him dressed only in trousers and tunic in the fashion of a petitioner come to court to beg favour of his sovereign.

And yet what a decadent court Loki called now. The flush of Thor’s face remained yet, lit up as it was by the gleam of his curse, both bewildered and intrigued in turn. But for all the hardness hardly concealed by his trousers, Thor could scarce look upon where Mjölnir penetrated Loki deep. His teeth closed over his lower lip, worried there for some moment before he found voice with which to speak.

“Does this not hurt you?”

Loki snorted, though he had expected as much. Despite his brother’s habit of charging heedless into any battle when the inevitable bloodlust had been roused, in childhood he’d had a tendency to think his younger brother always in need of his protection. That had waned, with time; it was rare indeed in these days for Thor to pay attention to any upon the battlefield other than himself and his own chosen foes.

“It is…awkward.” With a grimace Loki shifted his hips, forcing muscles of thigh and calf to relax. “I can…adjust myself around her, but as I imagine you know I cannot adjust Mjölnir herself.”

Loki did not know what caused Thor’s frown: the hint of pain, or the long-held bitterness that Mjölnir had not chosen him as her champion. “Should I move her, then?”

“No, it’s…it will do.” Setting his chin high, Loki pursed his lips and raised one eyebrow in high challenge. “Although you could make yourself useful by not dragging this out any longer than necessary.”

Both affront and uncertainty flashed through the clear blue of his brother’s eyes. “What…” Clearing his throat, he tried again. Strange indeed, to hear his brother so tentative of his actions. “…what would you have me do?”

“Come closer and I will bring you off with my mouth, again.”

At Loki’s blasé tone, Thor stopped after barely half a step. “Loki.” The callused fingers spasmed, then moved to work an uneasy rhythm upon his thighs. “Can you not just…use your hands, as you did before?”

“I _could_. But I already said I think actual penetration is needed?” At Thor’s unconvinced expression Loki blew out a sharp breath, then winced as he moved again upon Mjölnir’s haft. “Curse-breaking can be quite the literal effort, believe you me.”

“Please tell me you have not had experience with curses such as this.”

“Not of this precise nature.” Loki could not help but quirk his lips at Thor’s halting disbelief, though it _was_ uncomfortable to hold Mjölnir in this way. It also had been some time since he last allowed someone into his body. Loki was not given over to the habit of it as a rule, given most had the foolish belief that it would but grant them power to wield over the sly second prince. Much as Loki could delight in proving them otherwise – and had – there were simply better ways to spend his time.

As he brother dithered further Loki adjusted the placement of his knees, the movement bringing an uncomfortable shift of the shaft within him. Angled as it was, with the blunt end too deeply inserted to strike where it would pleasure most, Loki could not find it entirely enjoyable. Then again he supposed that was hardly the point. Closing his eyes, cursing his brother’s idiotic excuse for morals, Loki bowed his head and began to count.

Halfway to the point where he had decided he was going to wring the great oaf’s neck, he shivered; scarcely a moment later warmth descended upon his shoulders. Loki’s head jerked up, breath catching on familiar scent.

“I was worried you might be cold.”

The sincerity of his idiot brother’s gesture and tone meant no quick jest came to mind, eyes fixed upon him in half-blind stare as one hand rose to twitch the cloak closer. “Oh.”

In that uncommon silence Thor came down to his own knees before his brother, face almost that of a stranger’s in its troubled cast. “Loki, you do not have to do this.”

“I do believe I was born to keep you in line.” Despite the twist of his heart, again Loki kept his smile devilish as he motioned him close. “And as I said, do not drag this out.”

And Thor obeyed, as always his mind slaved to the desires of his body even as he gave his token protest one last time. “Still it feels…so very unworthy, of you.”

“We could have done this the other way around, but you seemed disinclined.”

“I did not realise you would do _this_!”

Unmoved by the rising of his brother’s voice, ricocheting from every surface of the cavern, Loki managed a faint shrug despite the tense line of his body. “Do you not remember the rule, brother? When considering Loki’s next move, think of the one thing no-one else would do, and then wait for me to do it.”

The smile that came in automatic response was but fleeting. “I do not wish to dishonour you.”

“Stop with the pleadings and protestations, brother. I am not some maid you are tumbling in secret in mother’s gardens or father’s solar. I am not going to run to all of Asgard or any of the realms beyond to brag or bleat of the pleasures I did or did not find in your bed.” Thor’s eyes widened in reflexive pique, and Loki rolled his own. “I am your _brother_. I only mean to aid you in escaping your latest foolishness.”

“But this is not what brothers do.”

With an impatient sigh, Loki rued his phrasing; the low hum of Mjölnir within his body disturbed his thoughts more than he had anticipated. “We are Princes of Asgard, and we do what we like.”

“We do what we must,” he corrected, as sincere as he was stubborn. In answer Loki could not contain the faint irony of his smile.

“Father taught us well.” Drawing himself upward, he settled his face into a mask made purely to be a parody of rueful pleasure. “Come, Thor, and let this be done. Even once it is finished, I still must work out how to break the wards that hold us here.”

Yet his fool brother hesitated still, eyes passing to the side. “Please believe me, this is not what I intended when I planned this journey.”

The tightening in his chest held an echo of what he had felt when Thor had first come to ask him to accompany him to Vanaheimr. He had assumed then it would be an ill-advised chase after some half-mythological beast spoken of over copious mead in some disreputable tavern; while Thor’s damnable companions had little respect for Loki’s abilities as an actual warrior, they upon occasion found his skills of stealth and his near-limitless recall for facts pertaining to both the land and the creatures that roamed upon it of use. Loathe as some were to admit as much.

But Thor had insisted that this be just for them both. For Loki’s foremost benefit, even. And though Loki had experienced enough mishaps during his brother’s blundering attempts to share his interests in the past, he had acceded. Really, he had supposed it could have been worse.

But then this likely was as bad as it got, even before his brother raised a hand and settled it upon the tense angle between shoulder and throat.

“Thor.” Words came difficult then, and even though his brother’s grasp held him steady Loki felt as if he might suddenly fly all to pieces. He could look nowhere else but into those earnest eyes, tongue heavy and strange in his mouth as if held by a truth-spell. And yet he knew that they had come too far, that there could be no retreat. “Thor, open your trousers.”

Despite the mottled flush still that began at cheekbone and reached at least as far as his opened collar, Thor still managed his particular brand of droll disbelief. “You have always been terribly overbearing, for a younger brother.”

“Ah, but then I am a Prince of Asgard.”

“And I am your elder.”

The old argument had not impressed him even when they had been but young children at play. “It does not necessarily make you my better,” he said, long fingers now indolent upon his own lips. Thor’s eyes followed, his own hand heavy against the pulse of his throat; Loki raised his voice, drew him back. “Tell me, then – of the two of us, whose manhood gleams like an elven blade?”

Thor blinked, startled. Then he grinned, crooked and cracked wide open. “And of the two of us, who rests upon the shaft of the greatest weapon in all the realms?”

Loki snorted. “Have you never wanted her this way?” At the averted eyes, his filled with glee at the unexpected target the idly-loosed arrow had hit. “A-ha! You have!”

“Loki…”

As Thor turned his head his hand fell away too, and for all the cloak remained over his shoulder Loki felt bereft. “Brother.” All humour had gone far afield now, for even with his innate curiosity he could not do this for long. “Brother, please.”

Thor could never say no to Loki’s pleas, whether direct or couched in manipulation. But he could not still the tremor of his hands as they worked over the laces. Yet when he freed himself he was more than half-hard; apparently the sight of his brother split open upon his damned hammer was more arousing than his morals could dampen down. Loki encouraged him forward, hands upon his hips as he pulled him into place.

“Thank you.”

Startled, Loki looked to his brother with unexpected frankness. “Are you always this much of a gentleman?”

A hand lowered, fingers moving through his hair. Considering the snarls and tangles it was not entirely comforting, except perhaps in its sentiment. “No.”

“That’s no surprise.” And then Loki took him back into his mouth. Thor shifted with a smothered startled sound that made him smile even around the bulk of it. Having done it once he had a feel for how to hold him, how deep to take him, what he appreciated most. Not a man of refined tastes, his brother, but then few men were.

Even as he bent to his task Loki felt a faint stab in his heart, blade shaped in the memory of his brother’s mingled outrage and disgust when he had concluded Loki’s skill was learned and not innate. But in truth he had not performed this often. Whenever he had it had been a curiosity to be slaked, in the way of any other. He found amusement, too, given so often people thought it degrading to go to their knees before another. Such narrow minds thought nothing of the way their pleasure was power in the hands – between the _teeth_ – of the one before them.

Sliding his hands up to the waistband of his brother’s trousers, Loki encouraged them down. In his mind he knew there was no need for it, not really. He didn’t give a damn as he drew closer to the base, tasting deep musk. The thick hair about its root brushed cheek and lip; strangely, it made him consider his brother’s kiss. They’d shared brotherly pecks as children, and then there had been the odd press of lips to forehead or cheek as adolescents or even adults. Such contact only gave him fleeting sense of the bristle of his beard. In that Loki wondered what it would be if he pressed deeper, longer – if such were done in passion rather than just for innocent contact.

_This is not what you do this for_. But he could not help but contemplate it, and his traitorous heart knew exactly why. It had simply been so long since they had spent any time together. But in this moment Thor was his and his alone. Hands moved possessive over the tight muscles of his lower back, then dipped lower still. First cupping the solid curve, his fingers then slid into the crease between thigh and buttock. It was not enough. His body seemed to spark along nerves now exposed and raw, and Loki felt dizzied by the urge to press further and deeper into his brother, burrowing beneath his skin and into his body from which he would then never be moved.

_You won’t leave me, then. Not if we are together always._

But Loki knew it was not the way of such things. Even as he drew his brother down, head pressed against the back of his throat, pressing up the back of his tongue, flicking the tip against the throbbing vein. Thor was not his, no matter how he might pretend otherwise. Only ties of blood kept them together, the memory of a thousand years. Had they not been related, the golden perfect warrior would never have paid the slightest attention to the lean and hungry seiðmaðr. His chosen companions said as much – and for all Sif was a deep oddity herself, she was odd in a way that Thor admired with her wiry muscles and stubborn personality, quick of tongue and wit.

As Thor murmured nonsense syllables, by turns low and pitching higher, Loki thought he might be causing pain; his fingers surely bruised that golden skin as they anchored deeper yet. But Thor’s body said otherwise – or else simply did not care. Beneath Loki’s hands it spoke a language entirely its own, rich with invitation: the shallow thrust of hips, the gasping breath, the twitch of the cock, the taste of pre-come salty and rich. Lips worked back, dragging saliva along the glistening length; Loki brought one hand around to grasp the base, moved faster. As his brother gave a gasping hiss at the scrape of teeth, Loki did not suppress an involuntary smile. It could never be anything but this way between them. There could never be a battle named worth fighting until first pain, and drawn blood.

The movement of his own hips came almost as a surprise, his cock a heavy weight between his thighs as it strained upward seeking attention, satiation. Loki’s breath trembled in his throat; he’d given it no real thought in the beginning, even when he had worked himself open to take the shaft. In those moments he’d told himself with stern purpose this was not about pleasure, except in the sense a genuine physical response from his brother was needed to break whatever mad curse had befallen the great fool. For the first time Loki debated whether his own were necessary too; in response his body clenched about the haft, warm and thrumming with low song deep in his body.

He knew it only natural for his trickster soul to take obscene delight in this. But even as he swallowed Thor down again, he trembled upon Mjölnir and the peculiarity of her growing warmth even when thrust so deep into his own heat. It reminded him of how Thor felt to the touch after battle, a restless dynamo of coiled energy demanding continued release. And, too, it brought to mind the one time he had taken Thor by the arms in the depths of a berserker rage and screamed at him to stop.

Trapped as he was by Mjölnir’s rigid shaft, Loki’s body shuddered with the memory of it: the fear and the folly of that moment when Thor, sightless and blazing with rage and bloodlust, had raised Mjölnir to him. If it had been brought down in grim purpose, the uru-head would have split his skull. He’d played at fearlessness when he stared into those maddened eyes and shouted again _cease, you fool!_ and yet waited for the killing blow that never fell. Instead, Mjölnir had fallen. Thor had let her go in favour of his brother. And now Loki drew his brother’s cock deeper, the hammer buried in his flesh become a part of him in a way that had never been intended.

Loki knew Mjölnir’s song well, for all he had always sensed it not to be meant for his ears. Instead he had heard it only in vague snatches like a voice in a distant room, one always locked tight against his faltering entrance. But still she had called to him like siren-song: her murmur, when quiescent; her battle-song when at war. Every swing and thrust and blow was the counterpoint contralto harmony to his brother’s rich baritone, the melody of blood spilled and bone broken and life striking death like lightning loosed from the skies far above.

In such song Loki had always been held apart and away, the tenor out of tune with no part written for his voice. Except in this. Except now. But not even she stood between Thor and himself in this moment – instead she felt to be pressing them _together_. In this it was he and Thor, Loki’s skin alight with sudden charge from he knew not where. It was not the silver-shot static charge of storm, called by the hammer or held by his brother. This was his own lauded precious control slipping from his grasp like a quicksilver fish slipping its net, his seiðr loosed like wings opened for flight and freedom.

Loki did not even realise he was being pressed away. Back arching, cloak fluttering to the floor like a loosed phoenix wind set afire, his mouth opened wide and no sound emerged. No hand had touched once upon his throbbing member, and his hips were still upon the hammer. And yet he still felt as if he lingered upon the edge of the highest precipice, only his grip on his brother holding him from the fall.

“Brother,” came Thor’s stumbling voice, calling him back. “ _Brother_!”

“Thor.” Straining through half-closed lids Loki struggled to catch sight of him, as if his brother existed on the other side of a veil between the living and the dead. “Thor, what are you doing?”

“Brother,” he repeated, voice shaking fit to shatter him from the deepest centre out, his arousal hard and bright against his stomach even as he knelt again, “brother, you are _crying_.”

“Am I?”

As Loki stared, for all his command of multiple languages unable to understand, Thor’s hand moved with a light press of finger beneath one eye. When he brought it to Loki’s eye level he could not deny the saltwater shine upon even his perspiring skin. With a jerk, he then looked away. “We should stop this.”

“ _No_.” The vehemence hurt, but Loki grimaced through it. “No, not when we are so close.”

“I will not hurt you. Not for merely myself.”

A chuckle had to work free in honour of his brother’s stubborn pride. “It’s not pain.” This time the laughter was meant for himself, light and unfettered in a way he did not often know. “Brother, it is _joy_.”

“Joy?”

A touch of the wry to it, now. “I have always been envious of you, for possession of her.” His lower teeth drew his upper lip down, and he forced the smile. “She gives her song so easily to none other than you.”

If not for the fact Loki knew all too well his brother’s most basic arrogance, he might almost have found the uncertain tilt to his expression somewhat endearing. “She was a gift.”

“If she cleaves to our sire, it is merely because she respects his place as Allfather.” Scornful as he was, some part of his mind did wonder if Thor had truly not known as much. “She is a gift who gives only herself.”

“You hear her, then?”

“Oh, I’ve always heard her.” The bitterness surged in him, molten volcanic rock solidifying to glassy brittle darkness. “But then she’s never sung for me alone.”

Leaning close, sudden, Thor pressed their foreheads together; his skin felt as warm as the breath upon his skin. “She likes you.”

Loki’s snorting little chuckle escaped before he could think to hold it back. “I shouldn’t imagine she would have allowed this, otherwise.”

“You are truly not in pain?”

Tilting upward just enough, Loki met his eyes with a look he designed to be all innocence for all he still bore the taste of his brother upon his clever tongue. And of course he was struck with an urge he did not deny to ghost said tongue over his lower lip in lewd invitation. “ _Yes_.”

Given his faint smile, Thor remembered well that his brother’s answers could never be anything but true to his own ambiguous self. “You say Mjölnir is a gift given only by her own will,” he said, quiet, fierce, “but I know of another who is the same.”

Caught under that piercing gaze, still as prey set upon by a hunter that had lurked unseen in the deep forest, Loki trembled. Rare as it was for him to fear anything of his brother, in that moment he found himself doubting his mastery of the situation. “Thor.”

As if called he leaned close, mouth damp promise against the pulse of his throat. “Shall we end this, then?”

“We should end this.” Definite as he tried to make the demand, it came more as something husky, tentative. “Rise, then. For me.”

And yet Thor obeyed it as if it had been true command. As soon as the hard cock came to the level of his mouth Loki took him again. Thor let out a shuddering breath which Loki took as entirely unnecessary invitation to draw him deeper still, and closed his eyes.

It came almost involuntary, the urge to rock; within moments he rode upon the slick shaft hammer, a slow glide of up and down in short shallow bursts while lips and tongue continued about their work. Thor’s hands had moved, were almost shy where they curved about his head. With a smile and a scrape of teeth, Loki brought forth a surprised grunt. Then, he laughed around the weight in his mouth as Thor’s fingers clenched tight in the tangle of his hair, at last encouraging him faster.

Without warning one hand moved low, fisted about his cock. Loki gasped, bucking as much as the unforgiving shaft would permit. _This is not allowed!_ he screamed, though only in mind. His voice had been stolen, overridden; with Mjölnir in full song and half-blinded by the surging light even with his eyes clenched shut Loki felt lost, cast hopelessly adrift by his own machination.

Only his brother remained real, gold-wrought anchor as Loki’s hand stole in shrewd curve about his buttock. His fingers still bore the oil with which he had anointed both hammer and himself; could not help but press forward, one breaching that hidden place. But even as his brother tensed in sudden surprise Loki ventured deeper, curled upward. His mouth working in obscene pattern, he pressed hard. And his laughter thrummed through his own body like a song’s fermata as Thor’s shout rocked the foundations of what felt Yggdrasil herself.

Yet even as his brother’s great form began to subside, muscles aflutter and his breathing hard and harsh, Loki’s own body seemed to have been transmuted to something else again. He opened his eyes, caught the perfect blue of Thor’s, and again: he was unknowing prey, the hunter appeared from darkness with blade and bow to hand. Between them existed now a moment of utter stillness, as if the universe held its collective breath only to see what might happen next.

“Loki,” Thor whispered, eyes wide and wondering, a question forever to be unspoken upon his lips.

And Loki did not wait. Loki threw his head back, riding the breaking storm, and nothing else mattered but the silver and the lightning and the song of both together.


	6. Chapter 6

Loki’s silver tongue had roused many, in his time – often to anger, commonly to exasperation, sometimes to laughter both grudging and uncomplicated. But given his brother’s habitual reserve, his innate aloofness, Thor had never really considered how it might rouse another to carnal pleasure. It did not aid matters, that to Thor’s eye Loki had often appeared disdainful of women in his way. After the first time he had worked his mouth upon him this night, Thor had begun to wonder if perhaps Loki simply preferred his own gender for such sport.

But such talent as this he could never have imagined from any person, let alone the elegant reserved creature he named brother. Not even after the first coming that had left him weak even as it strengthened him all to blazing light, rendering him the centre of a supernova. That it had something to do with Mjölnir, he did not doubt. But he also did not doubt it had worked; even now he could feel roiling storm energy coursing through his whole body as he hunched over his brother, shaking, spilling into that sucking greedy mouth. Thor gave him everything and cared not to take anything back. And yet nothing felt peculiar. Everything felt utterly natural. In this all seemed as if it should always have been this way.

Loki had spoken of Mjölnir’s song. Thor had heard her carolling, too, the strange frenetic rhythm and pace he usually only heard driving the beat of his berserker rage. Such a dance was the oldest of them all – but then, perhaps that were not true. Life had to come before death, but then one could not exist without the other. In that they were a matched pair, whirling about one another in a constant play of take and give.

_She will build, and she will break_ , his father had said, lined face grave and left hand strong upon Gungnir when he had first bade Thor lift Mjölnir from her pedestal. And Loki had worn his own face like a distant mask, strange and almost alien in the pulsating light of the distant Casket of Ancient Winters. He had not been invited to this gift-giving. But still he had been at his brother’s side nonetheless, and when his father had looked between them both Loki’s words had been even and flat as any decree inscribed by the hand of a king.

_“I am to stand always at my brother’s side, though all good and bad, am I not? It is what I was born to, to stand ever as my brother’s shadow.”_

Sometimes Thor had to believe Mjölnir a tool more suited to a hand such as Loki’s, to one that understood her origins. But instead she had named herself a weapon called to his warrior soul. Drawing back, driven to his knees, he steadied himself, perhaps them both, with hands laid upon his brother’s narrow waist. The undulation of hips had subsided, but still his cock arched upward over the shivering tremble of his abdomen. Thor’s mouth turned dry, palm slick with oil and memory. That flesh had felt as natural as Mjölnir’s own shaft when he had reached for it, when he had taken his brother in firm willing hand.

But did not reach out again to return what Loki had given him. The glow of his cock had left him, yet now it radiated from Loki; in this he seemed a creature wrought of stardust and shadowsun, falling and fallen alike. So many called him the sly silvertongue, mocked the way he so often skulked in shadow. But in this he banished all darkness, a diamond-sheened spirit of silver and cold lightning.

But for all the illusion of ice-limned light Loki felt nothing but warm under his brother’s wondering hands. The hooded eyes slipped closed as he convulsed, went very still. A deep fear coiled in Thor’s gut as he stared at this light-wrought duplicate of his brother – but he was not afraid of him. Rather he feared _for_ him. If Thor let go he thought Loki might vanish, leaving only the afterimage burned on his retinae to remember him by.

“Lay me down.” And the words felt to be drifting, dreaming themselves into being as Loki wandered onward, somnambulist in full flight of fancy. Thor’s own voice tripped over itself in comparison, clumsy and careless.

“What do you mean?”

“I cannot move Mjölnir,” Loki whispered, faint as star-dust left by a comet in full flight across the galaxy, “but I can hardly hold myself upright, not like this. Lay us both down, Thor.”

His great hands had never been naturally gentle; he felt as though he cradled a baby bird in his hands as he reached forward to brace one awkward palm behind the small of Loki’s back. The other hand tilted the hammer slowly onto one of its side faces as he lowered his brother to the floor, the much-abused cloak soft beneath him. A sigh escaped him in slow keen, Loki’s breath warm against the skin of his throat; it set his hair all to prickling along the back of his neck.

Thor knew that he should look away. The trapped energy had leached joyfully from his body to pass to his brother’s in brilliant release, and whatever more Loki needed to do, he presumably could do so on his own. But alight with silver, sparking from his skin, eyes half-lidded, hands upon his hips, sinking lower onto the welcoming shaft—

_He is your brother._ But this was his brother alive with a song Thor knew well – that of Mjölnir, the warrior’s blazing storm. Caught upon its power, Loki was slaved to his own desire, one hand drifting close to his own arousal. Though he tried to avert his eyes Thor found the harder he tried to swallow back on emotion unworthy of the moment, the drier his throat became. It felt as if a song lurked there too, one that demanded to be sung. Choking on words he could not know, _dared_ not know, Thor turned, hand over his mouth.

Loki’s head turned to follow. Thor could do nothing but look back. He found dishevelled hair trailed upon the cloaked cavern floor, his brother skin perspiring and eyes hooded as if he walked the edge between dream and waking. “I never imagined it could feel like this,” he said, and the long fingers of one hand wandered like absent dreams upon the wind. “Thor, this feels…”

His own breath shivered like winter. “Can you…not let it go?”

“Oh, I _could_.” His laughter rose, fell as soft rains. “I just don’t wish to.”

Thor could say nothing to that, eyes quite locked upon the slender sudden arch of Loki’s back. As the silver light danced over his skin, like sunlight radiating out from some secret source deep beneath his flesh and bone, Loki twisted, gasped, sweat-soaked and sensuous. “How do you ever give this up, Thor? Why do you not spend your entire fool life walking around with this always within you?”

And he could not hope to deny the twitch of his groin when his eyes were automatically drawn to where the handle still disappeared into the clenching warmth of his brother’s willing body. Dry mouthed and damned, Thor shook his head, stared.

“I am not certain we feel it the same.”

“Perhaps not.” Loki teased him now, for certain; the shifting of his hips was too deliberate, the handle driving deeper. With bared throat and eyes wide, pleasure dripping from mouth and skin alike, Thor had to turn away one last time.

“I should…I should go.”

“No. _No_ , I need you to…” One hand scrabbled over the cloak, found no purpose; Loki could go nowhere with Mjölnir holding him so pinned. “Wait. Please.”

And Thor could do nothing but watch as Loki clenched his fists into the cloak, braced his feet flat upon the ground; when he canted his hips, words of power and purpose beyond Thor’s understanding drove themselves deep into the air as if they were made of iron rather than sound. With such so easy upon his tongue Loki bid the borrowed energy leave him in peace.

All trembled upon that moment. Indecision shimmered through the air like a cool breeze, and Thor wondered at it; how could such a summoning have such a _care_? And then it did not matter. It left Loki’s body in great rush, retreating from skin and nerve and trembling bone, coalescing within Mjölnir’s thrumming head in one great flow. His body subsided, breath escaping him in low keen of regret and loss as the last of it returned to the hammer. Then his eyes closed, as if he had never known such exhaustion.

“I cannot move her.”

The thing quality of his brother’s voice tugged at something in him; he had never liked to see his brother ill, hurting, forgotten. _And yet what of the years most recent?_ Guilt followed, but something that might have been even pride accompanied Thor as he went to his knees between Loki’s spread legs. His cock, aroused still, pressed dripping and hard against the flat plane of his belly. With teeth digging into lip Thor looked further down, took Mjölnir by her opposing longitude faces, and gently began to ease her out.

And then, he stopped; Loki’s low answering whine had cut through him like serrated blade. His own breath sharpened, quickened, vision narrowed in upon the gleaming glowing head and the ridged shaft still half-buried in his brother’s body.

And that body gave an uneasy undulation, toes curling, thighs tense. “What are you doing?”

“I…” Thor had resorted to staring at his hands. He did not trust himself to look anywhere else. “…I am hurting you.”

“No.” Loki’s words tangled about a low chuckle, one so ragged as to taste nothing at all like regret. “It is more…I want her _in_ , again.”

“I am not certain that is a good idea.”

“It most certainly is not.” Even as the muscles seemed to work to bring her back Loki gritted his teeth, rolled his head back and forth so that his hair moved in the motion of a thousand black whips. “Take your damned hammer, Thor.”

It was hard to know whose command drew his hand quickest: that which came of Loki’s damp lips, or the humming silver chorus of the hammer herself. Regardless, Thor’s grip closed tight about the handle. Warm and damp, she sent a tremor like earthshock through his body entire, jerking his arm to movement. And with it came a groan like thunder to accompany the slick slide of sound as she left Loki’s body like a sigh of regret. It arrowed to his own returned arousal, and he only just bit back his own groan of sudden decadent need.

Loki lay still now, chest in arrhythmic rise and fall. Such lack of motion could not hold; but a moment later one lazy-fingered hand coursed towards his erection. Wanton and wild-eyed, Loki seemed uncaring of his brother still between his legs. Long fingers began their work, slow and thoughtful over the silken flushed heat of his prick. And below, the hole so recently vacated, reddened and soft, gave a twitch almost like the pursing of lips ready and waiting for the promised kiss of a suitor beckoned ever closer.

Thor did not really know what it was, then or later – the energy sparking in Mjölnir’s head, his renewed arousal, or just Loki’s slow undulation against his skin like a king tide bearing him home. Surging forward, with hand about his own cock, he pressed the head against his brother’s entrance and paused only by mighty will alone.

Loki’s eyes opened, mouth startled and slack. When they focused upon him, cool green reason, Thor felt his body go still and cold as a Jötunn warrior. It had been a moment of utter folly, to presume so upon ties of blood and brotherhood. Shame filled him, but still it did not beat half so hard as lust, as longing, as _love_.

When Loki spoke, his words were teasing, tender. “Jealous of your own hammer, brother mine?”

Such words, given over in idle invitation when in such position, should have made everything wrong. Somehow nothing had ever felt more right. “It has often forged a path I wish to follow,” he murmured in husky capitulation, and Loki rolled his upper body in soundless laughter. Then his eyes fixed upon him, and Thor felt the universe narrowed to one sensation, and one place in which it might be found.

“Then follow.” His tongue slipped free, left light film over smooth swollen light. “So then might you come, with me.”

But first came the frustration of a moment, the hasty pulling off of boots and full removal of trousers. He had no time for anything else, going to his knees before he drove into Loki with one sure stroke.

Despite the given provocation Loki’s body welcomed him with stark surprise, hands spread in cruciform arc as his back bowed up and loosed a shriek from deep in his pulsating throat. _So he does find his voice at such moments_ , Thor thought, hazy, and then it did not matter because despite the fact he had already given himself once, twice, in hot spill down his brother’s throat, he _ached_. In this he knew he could only find release in Loki’s body’s warm clenching heat, opened for him by the warhammer so long ago gifted to his hand alone.

But as much as Thor found pleasure in rutting into him, animalistic and raw, it could not ever be named quite enough. Caching Loki about the waist, Thor rocked back, dragging him onto his lap; with thighs spread and calves pressed upon the floor, his brother was split upon him with nowhere else to look but to his face. And Loki, dazed, gazed down upon Thor with lips slack and eyes hazed and heated. It was as it had been with Mjölnir – except now it was _his_ cock deep in his brother’s body, burning with the blood they shared rather that the silver light roiling in the head of the hammer the way winter did within the Jötnar’s stolen casket.

Loki’s face, pale in that radiant light, curved with sudden joy. One hand reached down, fingers playing at where they joined. His smile held all the promise of mischief and malice that he had been born to. Then, without warning: a rise and fall, hands on Thor’s shoulders where nails found blunt anchor; his head thrust back, hair a cloud of dark matter, throat bobbing as low sounds more pleasure than actual word moved in counterpoint to every thrust, every take. Open mouthed, Loki’s tongue played upon his lip, and Thor knew his brother would still be able to taste him there.

With every movement it became clear Loki knew best how to bring his own pleasure. Thor allowed him his head, his own cock welcome slave to the mastery of the clenching sliding riding heat that held it like molten metal within a crucible. When a low keen escaped Loki’s throat like a spirit spiralling upwards towards Valhalla, borne upon the back of a white steed and flanked by Valkyries, Thor stopped his own harmonic movement. He let Loki take whatever he needed Thor to give. And Loki drove forward, face buried in space between shoulder and throat. Teeth closed over skin, biting hard enough to draw pain and blood alike. Heaving, gasping, Loki held tight to Thor alone even as he flew all to pieces.

Silence could not follow in the wake of such sound. The air itself seemed charged, alive, a whispering chorus of a thousand voices of past, present, and future. When Loki raised his chin Thor stared into those blown eyes and saw it: a precipice, again. But nothing had ever felt more right – not the weight of Mjölnir, not the pressure of Gungnir – than when he threw himself over it that edge and gave himself utterly over to the wanton creature upon his lap. Catching his brother’s lips in a decidedly non-brotherly kiss, Thor tilted them over to the ground again to rest upon his own cloak in a tangle of limbs and lust.

There between his brother’s indolent thighs Thor found his third and final release. As he roared, Mjölnir trembled; but a second later it seemed as though she _exploded_. Energy spiralled out from her like the primordial detritus of a supernova, charged with that which brought the universe itself to life, as the seeds of mighty Yggdrasil herself. Thor could have tilted his head back, could have taken it all. But instead he pressed his lips to Loki’s and drank deep and greedy of his brother’s pleasure.

But Loki caught his face, drew back. His lips were drawn open in wide grin, teeth bared, eyes half-maddened. “ _Look_ ,” he whispered, and he laughed again, wild as the half-real creatures of spirit and want who had first made all the worlds. “ _Brother, look_!” And he did. With head back and hips forward, Thor rode the storm as his own release, loosing lupine howl to the heavens of a real not theirs. But then everything felt to be his, even as he gave himself utterly to but one another.

Hands drew him back down, clever fingers bringing his head to his breast before tangling in his hair. Thor gave a low rumble of mingled pain and pleasure, curving tighter; Loki sighed against him, a sinuous lazy curve. “That hammer of yours is a menace,” he said, half in jest – then, he stilled. When he spoke again, his voice trembled with bare and sudden shock. “Oh, I cannot believe this.” Shoving hard at Thor’s slack surprise, he rose with his temper, voice wicked spiral. “I cannot _believe_ this!”

Thor pushed himself upward even as Loki pulled his legs beneath himself in a trembling crouch, expression that of a hunter about to strike as his prey. And his attention focused only upon where Mjölnir lay close by them, handle oiled still and almost smug in her own strange release.

_She cannot be smug, she is just a hammer_. But he knew better than anyone the feel of a lie; he knew better than anyone the truth of her weight in his hand. The slap of Loki’s palm against her warmth felt like a strike to his own skin, even as his brother moved to his knees, loomed over him in his hazy of post-coital confusion.

“It was your hammer all along.” An accusing finger crossed the growing space between them, jabbing hard into his breastbone. “This is why I couldn’t lift the wards! I can’t lift the bloody _hammer_ , let alone the wards she cast!”

“I…” One of Thor’s hands mindlessly reached to cease his brother’s relentless jabbing, but Loki snatched it back as if burned. With a frown, he raised both hands in helpless surrender; he had scarcely come back to reality, and Loki’s ramblings upon sorcery often made no sense to his mind at the best of times. His brow furrowed deeper as he finally managed actual sentences. “I don’t understand, Loki. Mjölnir cannot work seiðr.”

If there had been anything to hand worth throwing, Thor had no doubt that not only would Loki have thrown it, he then would have retrieved it in order to shove it into whatever bodily orifice was most readily to hand. “She _is_ seiðr, you fool. Pure seiðr, born of and worked into metal forged in the heart of a dying star.” Long fingers worked into the sweat-damp hair, nails digging into his scalp as if such pressure could ease the roil of thoughts within. “The damned honour code says a true warrior will not work seiðr – but he can bear it.” When he looked up, his eyes held scorn, bitterness, and an odd kind of pity that made Thor squirm. “In the form of an enslaved weapon, it may be his pride and not his shame.”

“I…” Thor could not meet that accusing gaze for long, and did not know what matter to address first – or even if he were capable of understanding any of it. “…but…”

“All of this.” When Thor said nothing, Loki’s foot shot out in a frustrated kick that did not actually land upon Mjölnir’s runed face. “From _that_.”

“But I don’t _understand_!”

The cavern trembled beneath the volume of the words, the force of his bewildered sentiment. Loki folded over his updrawn knees, forehead upon his knees and fingers loose like an abandoned spider-web before his ankles. When he spoke, his voice was muffled, face unreadable. “Mjölnir trapped us here.”

“That is impossible.”

“Oh, no. Only improbable. Very, very improbable.” It sounded as if her were laughing, but when Loki looked up his pale face was as the frozen beauty of one of their mother’s ivory cameos. “And it never would have happened if her master had not willed it so,” he added blandly; at Thor’s indrawn breath a flicker of malice quirked his lip upward. “For all I know, she only followed _your_ wish and desire in doing this.”

“You are saying this is _my_ fault?”

Thor scarcely realised he had gone to his hands and knees before his brother, but when Loki raised one hand and shoved him back with palm to face, he did not move. “She has no true mind of her own. She is wrought of a force of nature, divine and true. But she channels _your_ divinity, and in doing so cleaves to your will.” Impatient now, Loki braced his hands, scooted himself backwards, eyes hard. “You are son of the Allfather as much as I, brother – and while it might seem I am all seiðmaðr and you all warrior, our sire is both. And we in turn have received both his gifts, unequal in measure, but true enough still.”

That bitterness remained, and Thor ached for it; he could not decide if it were for the fact for all Thor knew his brother treasured his seiðr, it was not the lauded gift Thor’s own prowess upon the battlefield was in the eyes of Asgard. Or perhaps it was more Loki resented now the fact that what he worked so hard at came more easily to Thor, who had so much already. Shaking his head, teeth clacking together, Thor finally managed to croak out something like speech. “Brother, you must know I do not know how to work seiðr.”

“You would not need to, with the force of Mjölnir behind your desire.”

It was the blandness of his words, the blankness of his eyes that did it. Thor’s bewilderment transmuted in moments, hot fury driving him forward, fingers digging into his shoulders as he shook his brother as if that might attract sense to his set mind. “This was never my intention!”

But Loki would not permit himself to be treated as a ragdoll. “Of course it wasn’t!” he sneered, wrenching free, hands stinging slap against even brawn forearm. “Your great blundering stupid heart only wants what is best for people, but most of all just for your own foolish self!”

The great eyes were sheened with furious tears, mouth in an ugly curve. Startled to silence, Thor could only stare, hands still and impotent. “Loki…”

Yet Loki gave him no further opportunity to look upon the undammed well of the emotion he so often chose to keep to himself. Scorning the cloak beneath him, Loki stomped further into the cavern, reaching for his neatly folded clothes. In numb silence Thor searched for his own trousers. When had reordered himself to basic decency, he swallowed hard and dared a look to his brother. Loki, already having donned trousers and tunic, reached for the heavier leather of the surcoat with a face like a summer night’s storm, all silver heat and fierce fired frustration.

“Stop.”

Loki was more than capable of ignoring him; Thor had once thought himself invisible for an entire afternoon when Loki deigned to pay him no attention when they’d been but very small. It said something for the fight he spoiled for that Loki immediately thrust the leather down, eyes narrow and voice rough. “What?”

Instinct told Thor to respond not only in the same tone, but with fist and body. Biting down hard on the berserker, Thor shook his head. “If I did this, by heart more than genuine thought…” Pausing, struggling hard, he spoke the next words in such a tumble he despaired of Loki even understanding a syllable. “…it was only that I wished to be with you.”

With a scoffing laugh, Loki bent from the waist to again take up the surcoat. “I rather think that desire went somewhat too far, even for your reputation as an adventurer in all matters.”

“But you liked it.”

The blurted words stunned Loki as much as they did himself; the surcoat slipped free, and his brother turned to him with eyebrows knit tightly together. “Thor.”

“And so did I.”

Still as Loki was, motionless as a shadow cast by the oldest of the trees of the wild forest that began at the very edge of the palace grounds, Thor knew that he wavered. Honesty had always been his brother’s deepest weakness, when given so open and free by another. And his throat worked, head turning away before his face could betray him any further. “We are brothers.”

Thor ached to reach out, to bridge that widening gap with touch and tenderness. But Loki had ever been fond of either. All he had was words. “We are the Princes of Asgard.”

Loki turned at that, eyebrow in sly arch. “And oh how the Allfather should be pleased to know of _this_.”

Panic sank sharp teeth into his hide, his spine stiffening and eyes widening; he was not a fool, no warrior got far in battle plans without forethought and foresight, but _that_ sight was not one he had considered. “Are you saying…Loki, did Heimdall see?”

Loki’s shoulders moved up, down; he seemed to have subsided to faint amusement. “I can’t be sure.” Closing his eyes, he laid his hands upon his thighs and expelled a long breath. “I have been shielding us from outside force. So no, I should think not. I do not know that I can protect from so all-seeing a sight, but…perhaps not.”

Again Thor moved close, hands closed about his upper arms and eyes bright. “Then this is ours, and ours alone.”

For all the swell of his own heart, Loki opened his eyes with a snarl and shoved him back so hard he overbalanced. “I will _not_ be your shameful secret.”

Forcing himself up again, Thor reached blindly, caught Loki about the waist. “You will be my treasured memory,” he insisted, struggling with a lapful of what felt a hundred squirming snakes. He held tighter. “And you will always be my brother.”

Loki went very still, and then craned his neck around to better display the venomous cast to his eyes, playful as his tone turned. “So this is what you wanted? A sweaty little fumble in some damp forsaken cave?”

Thor set his jaw, fingertips bruising deep. “I just wanted to be with you.”

During the silence that followed, Loki purposefully kept his eyes upon a point distant and dark. When he finally moved, it was deliberate and slow, and Thor could do nothing but release him in the face of such dignity. He was almost to the entrance of the cave before he stopped, crossed his arms. “We should go home.”

“But the wards…?”

Though it seemed Loki might have felt quite content to keep his back to Thor forever, he turned, strode wordless to where Mjölnir hummed in low song. One hand splayed across one face, and she almost seemed to tremble in shimmering, shivering pleasure.

Thor had no real sense for seiðr, not in the sense his brother did. He still felt a _lift_ , as if some fundamental shift in the very air itself had occurred. Eyes wide, he turned to Loki. “She listened to you.”

“She knows you love me.” Loki kept his eyes upon the hammer, fingertips in light play about the place where haft met head. “She wants me to be happy.”

“As do I.”

True as every word was, they were together a mistake and he knew not how. Loki’s face had only become more drawn, pale shadow of his usual low mischief. Turning his back on the hammer without a single look back, Loki walked away. “Let us go home, Thor.”

Only after replacing his boots did he look to the entrance. His cloak, however, seemed a ruin. But it was a memory, and his hands tightened in its scented stained heat.

“Leave it. We cannot take that home, not in that state.”

He wanted to say no. He wanted to stuff it into his journey-bag and refuse Loki this petty victory. But he swallowed hard, folded it neat, and did as his brother ordered.

At the entrance, Loki stood just inside, one hand shielded against the dawn. Little of the sun could be seen, sky heavy with promised rain strung across the sky in growing clusters of bruised and blackening cloud. But despite Vanaheimr’s propensity for such, Loki immediately recognised it for something else.

“Thor, call off your storm.”

His answer beat low against heart and sky. “It could bear us home.”

But Loki seemed furious, as if the very idea of such cleansing deluge was anathema itself. “Stop it!”

Bewildered, Thor scarcely knew what he apologised for any longer. “Loki, I…I am sorry.”

“You are not.” But all bitterness became something absurd, his lips in low smirk. “But then, neither am I.” Even as Thor’s eyes widened again Loki raised his eyes, stepped out into the pounding of the rain. “I just…you know I do not care to be manipulated into things.”

Following half-blind into his own storm, Thor loosed a laugh as wild as the lands which had been only theirs for so short a time. “No, that is _your_ game.”

“And not one I like to lose.” And his head had whipped around, dark hair dripping into his collar, pale skin like marble. “But then I would not wish to lose you.”

“You could never.”

But for all the low honesty of it Loki permitted no touch as they made the half-day trek to the Bifröst site, stopping only rarely to consume of their dwindling supplies. It was only when they stood upon the runes, the faint golden song of Asgard just beneath their heels, that Thor dared.

“We never collected what you wanted.”

Loki did not blink, eyes filled with rain as he stared upwards. “No. We did not.”

“Perhaps…we could come again?”

And his daring was rewarded; Loki’s laughter matched the rain, constant and warm. “I suppose that we _could_.” When Loki turned to face Thor, he did not smile. But the languid curve of his body seemed an open invitation as he gave in mild interest: “But perhaps next time you could bring a sword and leave behind your hammer.”

Thor did not bother to mask what he knew would be one of the smiles Loki had long ago labelled as too dopey to be fit for the face of anything but a drunken sow. “Just you and me?”

“Princes of Asgard.” With those cool words given Loki turned his head to the heavens, called the gatekeeper. At the sight of that beloved face alight with lightning and bathed in cool rain, laid bare before the sky, Thor felt something low twist in his gut. His heart wound in upon itself to match. He knew his place, as he knew Loki’s. This was not it. This was not where they belonged.

And then Loki rolled his eyes sideways, grin like the sky split quite asunder.

“And besides, whatever fool thoughts the damned hammer inherited, your cock and its desires are quite blatant enough without glowing bright enough to dwarf even the sun herself.” Crossing his arms over his chest, he laughed again, feral as a cat that would never know a master. “And people say that _I_ have to make a performance of things!”

Thunder rumbled in the distance, the low echo of laughter as Thor reached for Loki’s and held tight despite his protest even as the kaleidoscope descended to twist them home. But Mjölnir hummed like satisfaction in his grip, and in a cave deep in the wildlands of Vanaheimr remained still the cloak Thor knew all too well his brother could not help but claim again as his own.

It was a hunt Thor would always be only too happy to accompany him on, whenever Loki wished to range far beyond the known borders of golden Asgard. And so still he smiled, even when they returned home with Mjölnir merry weight in hand to match the light silver song beating in time with his great fool heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [breaks pens]
> 
> [flies off into the sun]


End file.
